Hello,
I'd like to hear what people have to say about the future of
continuations in Seaside. I saw a comment from Avi a while ago, that
has been reposted numerous times in various blogs, which said that
continuations should be dropped because they can be replaced by Ajax
and would allow support for Strongtalk.
For me, I'm just getting my feet wet with Seaside and a big reason
for my interest in the framework is because it *does* support
continuations. In my heart of hearts, I'm hoping those words were
taken a bit out of context and things are different now but please
let me know. I couldn't find additional material on this in the
archives, at least none that jumped out to me.
I come from a WebObjects background where continuations reign
supreme, they're called "component actions" in WO lingo. You could
always create a "direct action", and there are times for it, but
mostly it just makes more sense to use the continuations approach.
Almost all web frameworks support "direct actions", those are just
the urls with a query string of varName=value pairs separated with an
ampersand. The continuations giving a context to work with makes web
programming almost like traditional programming. It's nice. No need
to expose those query strings or generate them either.
In the beginning, when Ajax hit the scene and WO developers started
dabbling, you had to use "direct actions". Just because we hadn't
figured out how to deal with all the partial page loads and prevent
running out of your backtrack cache. Those problems have been solved
and it is now easy to use "component actions" with reusable Ajax
components. I'm hoping the same is true with Seaside.
Thanks,
-- Aaron